Our New Architecture Critic Talks About His Mission. It Starts in the Bronx.

I start covering the architecture beat today with a review of Via Verde, a housing project now rising in the South Bronx. It provides an occasion to start a conversation, to give you a place to respond to what’s written and post your own news about what you think is most important in terms of architecture and the built environment.

A few of my own concerns are laid out in the review. I’m interested in urbanism, city planning, housing and social affairs, the environment and health, politics and culture — in all the ways we live, in other words, and not just in how buildings look or who designs them, although those things are inseparable from the rest. The influence on architecture of social scientists and medical experts now investigating how actually to quantify the success and failure of buildings, to establish criteria of proof, an increasingly important word, in terms of, say, the claims of green and healthy sites, seems no less urgent than Zaha Hadid’s or Norman Foster’s latest undertaking. Who uses works of architecture, and how, and who benefits from them and who doesn’t, also matters, obviously, and from Colombia to Coney Island, Dubai to Detroit, ways of rethinking these issues have already begun to reshape thinking in architecture schools and offices and beyond.

The idea here is to help bring the conversation to a broad public. I will add my 2 cents to the forum occasionally, but hope the site will develop a life of its own. Selfishly, I’m also figuring to learn about what’s going on from you.

To get the ball rolling, I wonder what thoughts anybody might have about the relationship between aesthetics and public service as in the case of subsidized housing, and, in terms of urban renewal and social equity, what’s the difference between situating projects like Via Verde in poor neighborhoods and rich ones?